Our blog - Suilven and the Far North, May'17

A blog of our mountain adventures in Scotland, hiking, biking, rock-scrambling and more !

Suilven

2-5 May 2017
A few days of bespoke guiding in the far north-west of Scotland. Kevin was leading...

I was working with a film crew in the Assynt area and based out of Lochinver, to work on a shoot involving drone footage.

With the trip booked well in advance, anything could have happened with the weather. Everyone was in expectation of mist and brooding Scottish skies, but as it was, luck was on our side when a week or two of clear blue skies and warm easterlies settled over Scotland. Nobody could get over the fact that we barely saw a cloud the entire week!

But the dry weather had an Achilles heel in store for us, for on the early days of the shoot that iconic mountain of the area, Suilven, went up in flames.

With no rain on the horizon, the fire moved around and up the mountain, eventually burning the moors all the way to Lochinver, leaving smoke caught in the halos of the night-time street lights and leaving a fine layer of ash on the cars in the mornings.

We had alternative plans in the meantime: shooting locations were varied and diverse, from the cliff edges of Stac Pollaidh to the coastal fringes of Reiff and Stoer. On our last day of shooting and with the fires dying down, we took our chances with Suilven but in the end were denied the summit due to a flaring up in the fire activity. It was however, a spectacular sight, one which nobody who was present will likely forget.

Summit or no summit, the drone footage captured by the film crew will show the area and it's mountains off beautifully in a film to be released soon.